The present invention relates generally to information delivery systems and, particularly, to a novel, WWW/Internet-based, reporting service for customers requesting information located at remote back-end intranet servers of telecommunications service entities.
Major telecommunications service entities, e.g., MCI, ATandT, and Sprint, presently provide for the presentation and dissemination of customer account and network management information to their customers predominantly through a Windows-based graphical user interface resident on their computer workstation. Typically, service entity customers are enabled to directly dial-up, e.g., via a modem, or, alternately, via dedicated communication lines, e.g., ISDN, T-1, etc., to the entity""s application and database servers, and initiate the generation of reports of their requested account information through the reporting GUI. The report requests initiated by the customer are processed by the entity""s application server, which retrieves the requested customer information from one or more databases, processes and formats the information for downloading to the client""s reporting GUI.
It is the case that the telecommunications service providers provide many different services, and many of the associated service applications have been developed independently over time, and, operate on many different operating platforms. For instance, MCI""s Service View platform (xe2x80x9cMSVxe2x80x9d) provides for the generation of Toll-free Network Management data, priced call detail or xe2x80x9cPerspectivexe2x80x9d data for usage analysis and trending, and unpriced call detail or real-time xe2x80x9cTrafficViewxe2x80x9d data each of which requires a different reporting mechanism due to the nature of the data being presented. For example, much of the customers xe2x80x9cPerspectivexe2x80x9d data is provided in a CD-ROM media and shipped to the customer, usually on a monthly basis, and requires extensive client-side processing to utilize the data. This cuts down on computing resources as the customer requires a dedicated application and GUI to process this type of data. Moreover, such reporting systems typically do not provide any report customization or presentation options for the customer, and any reporting customization is provided by an application specific program running on the client workstation. Furthermore, such systems do not readily provide for the scheduling of periodic or ad hoc xe2x80x9cone-shotxe2x80x9d reports.
It would be highly desirable to provide an Intranet/Internet/Web-based reporting system that provides a common GUI enabling both report requesting, customizing and viewing of various types of data from different server applications.
Furthermore, it would be desirable to provide an Intranet/Internet/Web-based reporting system including a report manager and requesting tool that manages the generation and presentation of specific reports that are available to customers, and enables specific report customization and scheduling options.
It would also be highly desirable to provide a Intranet/Internet/Web-based reporting system infrastructure capable of providing for the secure initiation, acquisition and presentation of customer reports to customers from any computer workstation running a browser located anywhere in the world.
The present invention is directed to a novel Intranet/Internet/Web-based reporting system that provides a common GUI enabling the requesting, customizing, scheduling and viewing of various types of reports generated by different server applications and/or application platforms. More specifically, the present invention includes an Intranet/Internet/Web-based reporting system infrastructure employing report manager and report scheduler server components, and report requester and viewer client components enabling customers to define various reports relating to their telecommunications network usage, in addition to managing the generation and presentation of specific reports. This infrastructure employs novel authentication and security features providing for the secure acquisition and compilation of customer reporting data, configuration and generation of reports, and presentation of reports on the customers workstation via a standard web browser. Further employed is an integrated proxy interface that reformats specific browser-based commands and communicates them to one or more corporate back-end fulfilling servers comprising a legacy system infrastructure to provide various data reports for customers.